Here's the Halloween edition of the most popular Phoronix open-source / Linux news over the past month.

Published this month on Phoronix by your's truly were 288 news articles and 29 multi-page/featured articles. It's still near my routine goal of having one interesting Linux hardware review / multi-page testing article per day and close to ten interesting news stories each and every day. Before listing off the top articles, I once again unfortunately need to remind Phoronix readers that if you appreciate all of the work invested in Phoronix for delivering enthusiast/gamer oriented Linux/FLOSS news, please don't view this web-site without any ad-blockers or at least subscribe to Phoronix Premium to view the site without ads and to view multi-page articles on a single page, etc. Alternatively, PayPal tips or Bitcoin contributions are also welcome.

Those frequent reminders have become an increasing necessity due to the increasing ad-block usage and simultaneously those seeking more and higher-quality articles while I'm already working 80~100 hours a week to make ends meet. For some perspective, the most popular article listed below had generated less than $200 in new subscriptions/tips from that work, while it cost days of testing to happen and not to mention other associated costs -- along with having to buy AMD graphics cards retail, etc. That additional revenue wouldn't even cover the cost of adding a single extra mid-range AMD graphics card. So please consider showing your support for Phoronix so that more interesting Linux hardware tests can continue to happen, thank you.

With that said, here were the most popular articles this month:

22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux GamingWith Steam Machines set to begin shipping next month and SteamOS beginning to interest more gamers as an alternative to Windows for building a living room gaming PC, in this article I've carried out a twenty-two graphics card comparison with various NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon GPUs while testing them on the Debian Linux-based SteamOS 2.0 "Brewmaster" operating system using a variety of Steam Linux games.

Intel Core i5 6500: A Great Skylake CPU For $200, Works Well On LinuxWith Skylake's retail availability improving, we're starting to see more of the Skylake processors in stock besides just the i5-6600K and i7-6700K. One of the other processors now widely available is the Core i5 6500, which is a step down from the Core i5 6600K, but retails at just $199 USD -- making it an attractive offer for many building new PCs and trying to stick to a decent budget. I've been testing out an i5-6500 under Ubuntu Linux and so far this processor with HD Graphics 530 is running well and offers compelling CPU performance relative to older Intel hardware as well as AMD's APU/CPU competition.

Is SteamOS Any Faster Than Ubuntu 15.10 Linux?Over the past few days have been a number of SteamOS Linux gaming benchmarks, namely published so far are the 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming and 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux. When seeing all of those SteamOS results, you may have started wondering: is SteamOS any faster/slower than say Ubuntu Linux? In this article are some benchmarks comparing SteamOS to Ubuntu 15.10.

4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS LinuxContinuing on from Friday's article that was a 22-way comparison of AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards on SteamOS for Steam Linux gaming, which tested the hardware at the common TV resolution of 1080p, here are results for the higher-end Radeon and GeForce graphics cards at 4K.

FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.2 vs. Ubuntu 15.04/15.10 BenchmarksIt's been a while since last running any BSD vs. Linux benchmarks, so I've started some fresh comparisons using the latest releases of various BSDs and Linux distributions. First up, as for what's completed so far, is using the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 10.2 compared to Ubuntu 15.04 stable and the latest development release of Ubuntu 15.10.

Are The Open-Source Graphics Drivers Good Enough For Steam Linux Gaming?Over the past week on Phoronix have been several featured articles looking at the performance of SteamOS with the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers: 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA/AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS, 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS, and Is SteamOS Any Faster Than Ubuntu 15.10 Linux? One of the frequent questions that have come up since then is how the open-source driver performance compares to that of the binary blobs on SteamOS, so here are some of those benchmarks.

DragonFlyBSD 4.2 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 CPU PerformanceIn this article are benchmarks comparing the performance of DragonFlyBSD 4.2 to that of Ubuntu 15.10. With these CPU-focused benchmarks, the core scaling performance was also looked at in going from two cores through four cores plus Hyper Threading.

A Six Month Redux After Building A 60+ System Basement Server/Computer RoomIt's been just over six months since I completed construction on the large 60+ system server room where a ton of Linux benchmarking takes place just not for Phoronix.com but also the new LinuxBenchmarking.com daily performance tracking initiative and testing and development around our Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org software. Here's a look back, a few recommendations to reiterate for those aspiring to turn their cellar into a server farm, and a few things I'd do differently next time around.

Open-Source Doom 3 Spin Updated With Many New FeaturesWhile many initially looked at ioDoom3 as the exciting fork of id Software's id Tech 4 / Doom 3 source-code as it was done by some of the same folks as ioquake3, there sadly hasn't been much to report on in recent times for the project. Fortunately, the independent "dhewm3" is making strides as an open-source Doom 3 project.

Features To Start Getting You Excited For Linux 4.4While it's still likely to be a few weeks before the Linux 4.3 kernel is officially released, there's already changes building up for landing in the Linux 4.4 merge window. Here's a very early look at some of the new functionality to expect for Linux 4.4.

Sarah Sharp Steps Down As Linux Kernel DeveloperWhile Sarah Sharp had been a longtime Linux kernel develoepr and encouraged females to get involved with Linux kernel development, she is stopping any further contributions to the upstream kernel.

Is The Gentoo-Based Calculate Linux Faster Than Other Distributions?Yesterday I published the results of a 6-way Linux distribution performance comparison but not part of that original article were any Gentoo Linux results. However, with Calculate Linux 15 having been released yesterday and is a well known Gentoo derivative, I decided to run some extra benchmarks.

Kubuntu's Release Manager Calls It QuitsAfter Jonathan Riddell lost his leadership roles relating to Ubuntu, the future of Kubuntu became quite vague for after Kubuntu 15.10. Riddell has announced now that he's leaving Kubuntu.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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